How the Mind Seeks Truth: The 4-Step Process of Discovery and

"Possible" and "Probable" Explanations (original) (raw)

by Daniel H. Caldwell

The historians Jacques Barzun and Henry F. Graff write as follows on "How the Mind Seeks Truth":

Every thinking person is continually brought face to face with the need to discriminate between what is true and what is false, what is probable and what is doubtful or impossible. These decisions rest on a combination of knowledge, skepticism, faith, common sense, and intelligent guessing.

In one way or another, we decide whether the road to town is too icy for going by car, whether the child is telling the truth about seeing a burglar upstairs, whether the threatened layoff at the local plant will take place after all.

All adults have acquired techniques for verifying a rumor and a report so that they can take appropriate action. They supplement their experience and learning by recourse to special sources or items of information --- the broadcast weather report on the state of the road; the child's known habit of fantasy; or the word of the plant manager who has access to firsthand knowledge.

Few of those who run their lives in this way stop to think that in the first case they trusted a technical report which, though not infallible, is the only authority on the subject; that in the second case, the ground for judgment was prior observation and inference; and that the third resort was to a competent witness. It is sometimes possible to use all three kinds of aids to judgment, and others besides, such as the opinions of neighbors and friends, to say nothing of trial and error.

All but the most thoughtless and impulsive will use their minds before giving credence to others' say-so, and try to collect evidence before trusting their own surmises. The world is too full of doubt and falsehood to make any other course mentally or physically safe.

The intelligent newspaper reader, for example, daily encounters "incredible" stories and tries automatically to "verify" them, first by "reading between the lines" and drawing what seems at the moment an acceptable conclusion, and later by looking for further reports. Limited as this effort is, one cannot always make it from an armchair. . . .

When ordinary readers encounter a story of this kind and carry their speculation as far as we have supposed, they end by doing one of several things:

(1) they accept it because it appeared in a periodical they trust;
(2) they reject it because it does not square with what they think likely;
(3) they suspend judgment until more information comes out; or
(4) they ignore the enigma altogether.

A judicious reader will adopt (3), though there is nothing downright foolish about the other choices.

But the researcher and historical reporter has a greater responsibility, which denies him the right to any of the four solutions. He may indeed come to rest on (3), but not until he had done a great deal of work; and except under certain conditions, (1), (2), and (4) go against his professional training and obligations.

As the student of past events tries to answer the question What did happen? he confronts the same uncertainties as the newspaper reader, but with this important difference: the researcher must try to reach a decision and make it rationally convincing, not only to himself, but to others. The steps by which he performs this task constitute Verification.

Verification is required of the researcher on a multitude of points --- from getting the author's first name correct to proving that a document is both genuine and authentic. Verification is accordingly conducted on many planes, and its technique is not fixed. It relies on attention to detail, on common-sense reasoning, on a developed "feel" for history and chronology, on familiarity with human behavior, and ever enlarging stores of information. . . .

Source: The above text has been excerpted from Chapter 5, "Verification", pp. 109-112 of The Modern Researcher, 4th edition, 1985, by Jacques Barzun and Henry F. Graff.

This "method" (as described above by Barzun and Graff) by which our minds seek "truth" can be described as a 4-step process of discovery.

This 4-step process or method is used by people in their daily lives and specialized variations of this process are used by the police, courts of law, historians, scientists and other researchers.